Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.
— James Cash Penney (JC PENNEY)
It’s only the middle of January and already it’s been a challenging year. Within my small group of friends and coworkers, there have been three deaths in our families and two major automobile accidents. Today, the Ladies of Literature had their annual meeting to toast the new year and pick our books for 2012. One of our members said that 2012 had to get better from here. Another member predicted that we just might look back on 2011 as a really good year once we saw what Continue reading » Together We Can Do More
See the girl in the purple tee? See her I-can-do-this mojo? – I want me some of that!
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
— William Wordsworth
Recently a friend gifted me with a journal – a beautifully bound, preciously blank book. But, to my chagrin, I find that the pristine pages intimidate me.
I’m Breaking Out My Catcher’s Mitt
We have a great deal of freedom to choose exactly how we will live … each day is made up of a myriad of ‘choice points’ and Morning Pages [daily journaling] creates our ‘catcher’s mitt’ for many small ideas that lead to larger breakthroughs…
— Julia Cameron
from The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size
When it comes to journaling I prefer Continue reading » I Go to the Jedi…
I must learn to love the fool in me the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.
— Theodore Isaac Rubin
Do you believe that you are a learning and growing being? Back in the beginning of the self-esteem movement, many proponents recommended that you repeat an affirmation to help you improve your self-esteem. It went, “Everyday, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” To say that this became the basis of jokes about self-esteem is to understate how much of a Continue reading » Better and Better
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
— Harry S. Truman
I find that these days I am a slow learner. It’s not that age has slowed me down, at least not in the sense that we think of age slowing us down.
For the longest time, “conventional wisdom” (perhaps an oxymoron) taught that as we got older, our brain cells died off and we got slower and stupider. Just a few years ago, in his book When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box , John Ortberg wrote:
You start losing brain cells at an alarming rate. If you’re over thirty, you lose thousands of brain cells every day. If you’re very, very quiet, you can hear some of them dying right now.
Since he wrote that, science has discovered that Continue reading » How to Learn Faster
Photo credit: BouncebackCafe.com ©2010
We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history.
— Anonymous
With all of the turmoil of sorting through my parent’s stuff, closing up the house and moving Dad into a care facility, lately I’ve been focused on the past. I think that the past will teach us if we choose to learn. Unfortunately, mining the past for lessons can be a little like the old saw about the room full of horse manure: there has to be a pony in there somewhere.
The last time I was at my parent’s house I grabbed several sets of slides. For those of you who are too young to remember, slides were developed from slide film. Instead of printing the picture on photo paper, the image was developed and the film material was sliced up and mounted in a cardboard frame. Slides were much cheaper to process and had a special viewer which projected the image on a screen or a white wall.
Many years ago, I had purchased a Kodak Carousel projector. To see the slides, each one has to be Continue reading » Finding Lessons in Our Past
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